I have no idea what Luis Suarez was thinking – either last night when he appeared to bite Giorgio Chiellini in the Uruguay-Italy game or when he sank his teeth into opponents on the pitch in 2013 and 2010 – and I bet that if we were to ask him he wouldn't know either. That's the point. An act of this nature could never be premeditated. That would be freaky. When a person – be they a child or, more rarely, an adult – bites someone, we have to hope it's an impulsive action.

So what does impulsive biting actually mean? When Jonathan Creek actor Alan Davies bit a homeless man outside the performer's playpen that is the Groucho Club in London's West End, he admitted he was drunk, saying: "I lost it a bit and we had something of a tussle." Indeed, according to his victim, Davies temporarily lost it, biting for a whole 13 seconds. An article in the New York Times once suggested that celebrity bitings by the likes of Sylvia Plath and Mike Tyson were "an unattractive habit that lacks subtlety and nuance" and they did it for the "exhilarating release that only perforation can deliver". But if we ignore the nuances, we ignore the underlying meaning.

Bearing in mind biting is horrific for the victim, it seems we're fascinated by biting and can find it funny when celebrities bite. This reaction may be because it is an easy way for our minds to turn something socially unacceptable (biting) into something socially acceptable (laughter). The process could counter-intuitively be described as a mature psychological defence against the anxiety elicited by hearing about the biting.

Biting scares us because it is a cannibalistic behaviour. Just think of historical anxieties about being shipwrecked on a desert island and eaten by natives. It can involve literally taking a chunk out of another's flesh, threatening serious injury. It is also infantile, a phenomenon of the "oral" stage in Freudian psychosexual development – little children go around putting everything in their mouths.

It can also have a symbolic significance: there are only a few instances when the physical boundaries of our bodies are breached. Apart from having an operation, the obvious one is sex. At a deep psychological level, biting, when not done in self-defence, is about having a part of another person inside the biter's body. Since all our bite marks are unique to us, it's also a way of leaving a personal stamp on someone else.

In popular culture the archetypal biters are vampires, although as a psychiatrist it would be inexcusable not to also mention Hannibal Lecter. The popularity of one of the most disturbing fictional psychopaths lies in the combination of Lecter being a doctor (the ultimate healer) and a cannibal (the ultimate transgressor).

A report published by the FBI identified three types of violent biter: the experimental, the frustrated and the threatened biter. The experimental biter was thought of as a sexual deviant. The frustrated biter was someone with a criminal mind. And the threatened biter was thought of as being paranoid and retaliatory.

Sport, and football in particular, is by its nature a socially acceptable form of aggressive tribal competition. It seems that in this instance, the aggressive energy driving world-class footballers to perform well on the pitch may have been dammed up, only to be suddenly discharged in a shocking way.

Even in this context, however, biting can have sexual undertones. One question to ask is whether this incident was sadistic or born out of self-preservation. If it wasn't an act of self-defence, then it could be described as acting out a sadomasochistic fantasy. Sex can provide a socially acceptable vent for sadomasochistic fantasies (when it's consensual). After all, according to the Kinsey reports into sexual behaviour, half the people surveyed either had bitten or been bitten during sex.

Freud, although many would disagree with him, argued that we have primitive sexual and violent urges all the time – it is just that they're kept hidden from us on a day-to-day basis in our unconscious. It's a miracle of human evolution, therefore, that we're not actually biting people's heads off whenever we disagree with them.

So is there a secret Suarez in all of us, which our conscious mind somehow manages to keep in check? Perhaps I need to chew this one over. With some fava beans. And a nice chianti.